Telenor maintained its outlook for 1-2 percent organic revenue growth this year, after reporting a 1.0 percent increase for Q3 and 0.8 percent growth for the first nine months of 2017. The operator said it delivered a strong set of Q3 results, as over NOK 1 billion in cost savings this year drove a 9 percent increase in EBITDA.
Total revenues fell to NOK 30.735 billion from NOK 31.249 billion a year ago, hurt by currency effects and divestments. Telenor said underlying revenue growth was driven by Bangladesh and other emerging markets in Asia, as well as a solid performance in fixed broadband in Sweden and Norway. Mobile subscription and traffic revenues were up 3 percent on an organic basis.
The company's EBITDA before one-time items reached NOK 12.976 billion versus NOK 12.307 billion a year ago, and the margin rose to 42.2 percent from 39.4 percent thanks to the cost reductions. Telenor said it still expects an EBITDA margin of 38-39 percent over the full year.
The net result moved to a profit of NOK 5.756 billion versus a loss of NOK 4.821 billion a year ago, thanks to fewer writedowns and a profit on selling shares in Veon. The latter also helped boost free cash flow to NOK 9.426 billion from NOK 9.064 billion, as did a drop in capital expenditure to NOK 12.4 billion from NOK 15.6 billion.
Telenor ended the quarter with 176 million mobile subscriptions, up by 2 million from June. The main contributor to the subscription growth was Bangladesh, which added 2.3 million subscriptions. This increase was partly offset by a loss of 0.5 million in Thailand. The share of active data users increased by 2 percentage points in the third quarter to 52 percent.
